An interlude

 Dec. 29

We do not know the way that life has brought us to exactly where we are through purpose. Intention and purpose surround everything; yet in regard to our own awareness, a dark veil is drawn across them, and we mistakenly think that intention and purpose belong to us, and do not come from some other place we cannot understand.

Our ego begins where  we believe in our own intention and purpose. This obsession consumes human beings in a singular way. Even through science alone, the most basic of the disciplines, we can see that intention and purpose belong not to mankind, but to nature; that simple fact, of course, is either turned into a mechanical proposition or romanticized. The truth: that intention and purpose flow into being from a higher level that lies beyond nature and beyond man, is either faintly sensed or completely forgotten.

This is a big thought. It is a preamble to my own question about my own life. 

Exactly as I am, here, this morning, I have been created, brought into being, and grown up through a set of experiences to exactly this place. All of that is exactly where I ought to be and I am exactly what I ought to be, in the sense that intention and purpose have created me as I am. 

I emerge, here and now, from the fabric of the quantum state to be as I am because this is the way the universe has arranged itself since the beginning. There is a purpose and an inevitability that has led not only to the exact conditions and circumstances of my own life but that of all other lives.

That is yet another big thought. Yet it comes down to me accepting exactly where I am. My associative thinking and my fantasy, my imagination and my ego, constantly conspire to argue that something ought to be different somewhere; that something else should have happened, that others should have been kinder to me, that I should have been given more or that I should have taken more. That I am deserving in one way or another. 

As Henri Trachol once said of a question I asked him, comically rolling his eyeballs,  “I, I, I.”

This reply — which was not all he said, but was quite enough — sums everything up, doesn’t it? 

Do any of us see that this is how we actually are?

There is a force that can penetrate to the heart that is much greater than this one, this insignificant force of my own. If I get even the least taste of it, it reminds me that my own force has no power. I have simply been given the privilege of inhabiting a tiny fraction of that force which  does have power; and I ought to inhabit that with an unending amount of gratitude. 

When I get on my knees and pray in the morning, if my prayer is serious and heartfelt, I always sense this and see my inadequacy. That is the only point of prayer, in my experience. To remind myself of my own nothingness.

Today I want to resolve to be grateful for every single thing, to go against the thinking that tells me I deserve. I wish to invest myself in the faith, love, and hope of a new awareness of God. A new devotion to Christ. An appreciation of what is, rather than an inner argument about what I want for myself.

It must be frankly said that despite all my years, I am still trying to learn to do this. There is no easy path.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.